Abstract

The goal of this paper is to examine the impact of an overall market factor, the factor related to the firm size, the factor related to the ratio of book to market value of companies, and the factor of liquidity risk on expected asset returns in the Serbian market. For this market we estimated different factor models: Capital Asset Pricing Model (CAPM by Sharpe, 1964), Fama-French (FF) model (1992, 1993), Liquidity-augmented CAPM (LCAPM) by Liu (2006), and combination LCAPM with FF factors. We used daily data for the period from 2005 to 2009. Using a
demanding methodology and complex dataset, we found that liquidity and firm size had a significant impact on equity price formation in Serbia. On the other hand, our results suggest that the factor related to the ratio of book to market value of companies does not have an important role in asset pricing in Serbia. We found that Liu’s twofactor
LCAPM model performs better in explaining stock returns than the standard CAPM and the Fama-French threefactor
model. Additionally, Liu’s LCAPM may indeed be a good tool for realistic assessment of the expected asset returns.
The combination of the Fama-French model and the LCAPM could improve the understanding of equilibrium in the Serbian equity market. Even though previous papers have mostly dealt with examining different factor models of developed or emerging markets worldwide, none of them has tested factor models on the countries of former Yugoslavia. This paper is the first to test the FF model and LCAPM with FF factors in the case of Serbia and the area of ex-Yugoslavia.